All Names Have Been Changed (13 page)

Faye slipped into the seat she had vacated. ‘We’re worried about her, Declan. Did you notice her little finger?’ I shook my head. ‘She stuck it into a pencil sharpener while we were sitting there last week and …’

I put my arm around Faye when she started to sob. She couldn’t apologise enough as she dabbed the tears
away with a tissue, but they kept welling up and spilling down her cheeks as if a pipe had sprung a leak. She was unable to stem them.

When Aisling returned, her hair was beaded with mist. She didn’t say why she’d gone outside. The tip of her little finger was indeed bandaged up. I don’t know how I’d missed it before. Now that my attention had been drawn to it, I couldn’t tear my eyes away, couldn’t keep from wondering about the maimed nub of flesh inside. She bought a round and joined us at the table, looking about herself mildly. It was hard to know which of the girls to worry about most. Guinevere, for one. She had kept her distance all night. What had I done to offend her? She leaned forward to place her drink on the table and I glimpsed a white slope of breast inside her shirt. Desire surged so cataclysmically through me that they all must have noticed, they all must have sneered.

Guinevere looked at Faye. ‘Whatever happened to Mike?’ she wondered.

Faye frowned. ‘Who?’

‘God, yeah, Mike,’ said Aisling. ‘Your man with the ponytail.’ She laughed. It was as if we had imagined him.

‘You stupid bitch,’ Glynn suddenly spat at Antonia with no small degree of venom. We looked at him in shock. A door in the cabin of the plane had burst open during flight. An entirely different element had been introduced, one against which we had no defences. We sat there in horror, buckled into our seats, waiting for instructions: an oxygen mask to drop, a parachute,
something.

Glynn got up and lurched away, almost knocking over the table. We steadied it with our hands. It was clear that he was gone for good this time – he had taken his pint.
The four of us turned to Antonia for an explanation. She tossed her blonde head and smiled.

‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a perfectly lovely evening,’ she informed us, opening her handbag and dropping her cigarettes and lighter into it. She clicked the bag shut and tucked it under her arm. ‘Honestly, I have to get going,’ she insisted, as if we’d implored her to stay.

‘Did you shag Professor Glynn?’ I asked her straight out, a feed of pints lining my belly.

She reached forward to slap me hard across the face and then laughed gaily, a connoisseur of ambiguity. She was aristocratic, I’ll give her that. Haughty and cruel and balletic. She swung her coat over her shoulders. ‘Goodnight, all,’ she sang, a forced lightness to her voice. I wouldn’t have been remotely surprised had Antonia turned around one day and addressed us in an entirely different tone of voice altogether, as if she were possessed, or dispossessed rather. Her natural voice would be deeper, slower, more resigned. Maybe I could have warmed to her then.

Were I a real writer, I would narrate a scene describing Antonia’s solitary journey home to the leafy suburbs of south County Dublin at night. Our influence would wear off as the train stations shunted past, and she would become less glossy, more subdued. What did she have to go home to? No one, nothing, an empty house. Small wonder she was out with the likes of us until all hours. Small wonder she was out with Glynn.

She’d get off the DART and walk the few streets to her unlit period seaside home with its rose garden and bay views. If you couldn’t write there, where could you write? The house had a name, which I no longer recall.
Something genteel and Anglo. I can see the black font, but not the word itself, painted in duplicate in block capitals like a trespassing sign as I passed through her twin gateposts that one time. The crunch of gravel on her driveway delineated the point at which the mark had been irrevocably overstepped. I found I couldn’t turn back.

That house was too big for Antonia. It was a large family home. She had cheated it of its purpose. It needed children, dogs, an adult male. She rattled around on her own inside, constituting a temporary anomaly in its two-hundred-year history. It wasn’t designed for a separated woman in early middle age in the late twentieth century. Little, you could argue, was. The house was waiting for her to pack up and leave so it could resume a more suitable tenancy, she had once told us. But she wouldn’t give in to it, no, she most certainly would not. It wouldn’t get the better of her, she averred, knocking back a gin and tonic, a one-woman microcosm of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy still trying to hold the fort. We didn’t like to think of her going back there to brazen it out on her own, not after Glynn’s vicious attack.
You
stupid
bitch.
What had possessed him?

Antonia would unlock the lacquered front door onto an empty hall, through which she would pass without switching on the lights, ghostly in the tarnished mirrors. Down to the basement kitchen she would descend, the old servants’ quarters, to sit at her pine table in the darkness. I imagine she was tired, more tired than we were, being that bit older. The second she sat down, the mask would drop.
Voom,
like that, a dead weight. Onto the floor it would land with a clatter, the night’s dirty work, a sack of stolen loot.

I have no idea what Antonia’s real face looked like, except that it was smaller than the one she allowed us to see, less haughty, more pinched, and it ached from the effort of exerting self-control, and control of others, all day. When I think of her alone in her beautiful home, surrounded by her beautiful possessions, all that family silver and china but no family, I think of a Christmas tree in January with the fairy lights unplugged. It was not the image that she strove to project, but still, after all these years, it is the image that persists.

It had stopped raining by the time Professor Glynn came barging out through the double doors of the pub onto the arse end of Fleet Street. He took a moment to regain his bearings, looking up the street, then down, then up the street again, then down again, an eyebrow cocked sceptically as if it were all a big ploy to catch him out and he was having none of it. He turned around to read the name of the pub over the door and snorted: a likely story. As if he’d sink to drinking there. He was still clutching his pint.

Events that evening had not unfolded to his satisfaction. They rarely did, but that somehow never lessened the torment, never prepared him for the series of crushing disappointments that inevitably lay in store. Glynn was not an adaptable man. He complained bitterly about the evening’s proceedings, for all the good it did him – no one was listening any more. Stout sloshed all over his wrists and sleeves as he gesticulated angrily, for the great writer was still driving home his points, determined to win the argument, to assert his moral position (that she
was
a stupid bitch), though the opportunity for doing so had long since passed. Glynn was out in the cold.

He consoled himself by gulping down what remained of the pint, then stooped to deposit the empty glass in a
doorway rank with piss. He missed the pavement. The glass fell over and rolled into the gutter, where it shattered. Glynn looked away regally as if it were nothing to do with him, then unzipped his fly and contributed to the filth, the general squalor, the reeking cesspit that was Dublin City at night.

At the junction of Fleet Street and Westmoreland Street, the bould scribbler checked his watch only to discover that he wasn’t wearing one. He studied his bare wrist for a protracted period, then orientated himself to the right to contemplate the Liffey and O’Connell Bridge, leaning back as if this flat vista were a mountaintop of sublime proportions, too staggering to view at such close range. Whatever he saw placated him. Must have been the familiarity. The Mighty Glynn swayed gently, a man hearing strains of music on the breeze. There was a warm smell of hops on the air and he inhaled it deeply. His state of outrage appeared to have abated. He even seemed contented, briefly.

Glynn grunted and thought the better of going home. He consulted his bare wrist again, and it told him that the night was young. He turned his back on the river and set off in the opposite direction, making his way up Westmoreland Street with ostentatious care, raising his knees too high in the air as though the pavement were a flight of stairs. What a barrel he had become since gaining that extra weight over Christmas. Every pound of it had amassed around his middle, taut as a pregnancy, only higher. His limbs looked comically thin by comparison, shuttling up and down with the thirst. An awful cross to bear, the thirst, and Glynn a martyr to it. God knows, he wasn’t the worst off that night, and closing time wasn’t for another hour yet. It was the week before
the annual deprivations of Lent, and the city’s drinkers were going at it hell for leather.

Outside the public toilets on College Street, Glynn collided with a group of young fellas dressed in silky tracksuits. Oblivious Glynn hadn’t been looking where he was going and couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of himself in any case, having left his glasses on the pub table. He was blithely navigating his way to Bartley Dunne’s by ear when
bang.
The youths had colonised most of the public area, and the unexpected obstacle they presented sent the writer flying.

He reached for the nearest one to keep from losing his balance and caught the lad by the hips. Big mistake. The young fella shook him off with excessive force. ‘Get off of me, ya sick prick!’ he roared, ‘ya filthy puff, ya dirty bollocks, I’ll fucken burst ya!’ His friends goaded him on. ‘Fucken burst the poofter, go on.’ Several pedestrians turned around to detect the source of the commotion, but only so that they could avoid it. Nobody came to Glynn’s aid.

Aghast Glynn, blinking at finding himself in the centre of a ring of hooded teenagers who were baying words at him that he didn’t understand, was wholly at a loss as to how to respond. He stood beneath the statue of Thomas Moore, mouth agape, rocking on his heels, until the one he had allegedly
molested
stepped up to his face and hawked a big gob of spit into it.

Glynn crumpled before the teenager in a gesture of feudal submission, clawing the clotted fluid from his face as if it burned. ‘State a ya,’ the young fella pronounced in lofty judgement over the writer’s bent back. The rest of the youths laughed and congratulated one another on the calibre of the joke. Nice one, deadly,
your man’s a fucken spa.

The writer in the end provided little sport, remaining crouched in a stained heap on the pavement. He wasn’t even worth a kick. The gang quickly lost interest in him. No, there was more to it than that: they quickly became embarrassed by him, keen to distance themselves from the grown man huddled into a ball, making a holy show of himself in the middle of College Street, clutching the back of his head as he rocked gently and gently moaned, the fucken bleedin mentler. Nothing to do with them.

Glynn slipped off once the gang moved on. He no longer merrily high-stepped but shuffled uncertainly forward, the heels of his hands pressed into his eye sockets as if they had been gouged. It seemed that he was crying, and maybe he was. Emotions had been running high all night.

He dodged a bus and made it to the other side of the street where he clamped a hand to a black rail of Trinity, holding on to it to steady himself like a commuter on a train. It took him some time to regain his composure. He was unused to such rough treatment, unaccustomed to interacting with people who made no allowance for his gift. A jewel glinting up from the bottom of a rock pool is a jewel only for so long as it remains there. Pry it from the mossy stones and it becomes a piece of broken glass once more. The same applied to the great writer. Out on the street, he looked like any tired civil servant trudging home from the office, any disappointed husband or bad father. Detached from the context of his staggering achievements, Glynn was just another old drunk in a city rotten with them.

Eventually he released the rail and struggled on, a swimmer submitting to the powerful currents of the
street. He was swept around the corner with the flow of traffic from Pearse Street, all the time glancing fearfully over his shoulder. Indeed, he was being watched, but not by the little knackers. They had decamped to the Abrakebabra at O’Connell Bridge.

He headed not to the nearest pub, as might be forgiven under the circumstances, but straight back into the Republic of Trinity. He’d only lasted a few hours on the outside. This hasty retreat was an indication of just how thoroughly the attack had rattled him. He hadn’t seen it coming. Crime in the work of Glynn was perpetrated by the same old rogues and was thus predictable, manageable, even comical, part of the natural cycle of things. He depicted it almost as a form of tax, from which no one was exempt, except of course the artists.

No artists’ exemption was available to the professor in the wake of the assault on College Street. It had come from a quarter he barely knew existed. Glynn was essentially a man from a different era, although he hadn’t recognised it until that young fella stepped up to hawk a big gullier in his face.
State
a
ya.
Fucken
bleedin
mentler.
The large wooden doors at the entrance to Front Arch had been bolted over at that hour, and Glynn had to step through the hatch cut into one of them. No gougers would gain admittance there; the night porter would personally see to it.

It was mercifully dark within the seclusion of the college walls, but not so dark as to be unapparent even from a few hundred feet away that Glynn was shaking hard. The flame he applied to his cigarette strobed with the tremble of his hand. From that distance, it could have been a firefly. He sought refuge under the Campanile. Glynn was now standing on the former site
of the high altar of the All Hallows Priory, whether he knew it or not. The ruined priest at the ruined altar; it was a compelling image. On a better day, Glynn might have gotten a short story out of it.

He was invisible under there except for the glowing tip of his cigarette, which smouldered about his person like a tiny fiend. They were never far from his side, the demons. You couldn’t throw a stone. Glynn ventured out and wandered for a time between the statues of old provosts before settling down on a wet bench beneath a tree outside the Rubrics. The black and silver branches of the old oak were jewelled with glistening raindrops which splashed down on the great writer from time to time, though he didn’t seem to mind. He shook his head softly at his thoughts, which can’t have been happy, then checked his watch: still missing. It was ten past eleven.

Even with the august backdrop of the eighteenth-century collegial architecture lending him ballast, Glynn was not restored to his former self. He fell forward into a slump, cutting a despondent figure on the deserted lawns, like one of the wretched characters in the novels of his late career. It was getting increasingly challenging to tell him apart from his protagonists these days. Perhaps this was a difficulty of perception Glynn experienced too. Who was he if not the voices of his books, and what were they, only inventions? He had been accused of self-parody in the recent past in a provocative article about life imitating art published by a young academic from a lesser educational institution seeking to make a name for himself. Good luck to him.

Glynn’s mood of resigned acceptance didn’t last long. The icy temperatures must have gotten the better of him, because he jumped to his feet and took off across the
cobbles again. How quiet the campus was at night, and what a racket he made there. You could tell from the way he twitched, all elbows and knees, that he was entering a state of mounting agitation, his excess fury converting to kinetic energy. He must have resolved to commit his thoughts to paper, because he rushed along New Square towards his office, a man with a deadline to meet.

Unfortunately, the Arts Block was locked at that hour. Glynn rattled the long vertical metal handles of the glass doors in anguished protest as if they were the very bars of his cage. At least he was free to express his rage there without fear of retribution. It was hardly an adequate consolation, all the same.

He gave up and crossed over to the Berkeley, jerky as a hen. Two nights had passed since he’d slept in his own bed, in any bed at all. By then he had found himself in the company of some imaginary companion, one who was annoying him. He had to reprimand that individual more than once, but still they didn’t get the message. Glynn tried repeatedly to shake them off, pulling his arm away, swiping the air. ‘You’re a persistent fecker!’ he was heard to cry into the darkness of the rugby pitch. He did not stick around for a response but instead lashed up the steps of the Pav in his metal-tipped shoes, slamming the door behind him. At least he was back on form.

He lashed back out again seconds later, having got no satisfaction. Last orders had already been served. He paused at the top of the steps to gaze at the heavens and contemplate his plight before tackling the steep grassy bank. Here, he practically went on his hole. ‘Someone could fecking well kill themselves on that,’ the writer pointed out as soon as he had uprighted himself. He
looked around for a response, but his companion had deserted him. Glynn shrugged in resignation. This did not surprise him in the least. That was what you were dealing with. Everyone let you down in the end. Besides, he was used to being alone, though he wasn’t alone, not half as alone as he thought himself.

He set off across the sports ground again, his metal caps destroying the wet pitch a second time. What did he care? What was it to him? You could see him rehearsing the arguments in his head. As a proud Irishman, he had no respect for the rugby, it being the coloniser’s game. Glynn took pleasure in proclaiming divisive opinions when drunk, relished nothing better than starting a good pub fight, and did so as if it were his national duty. He never got a rise out of the girls.

The destruction of the pitch, it is to be hoped, allowed him feel less impotent for a spell. He held dominion over a soggy rectangle of grass, and he tore up and down it with the righteous indignation of the oppressed. That was Glynn all over. Never did know which side his bread was buttered on. Never managed to learn.

I hadn’t anticipated that he’d double back on himself like that. He turned his head and looked right at me, where I stood hands in pockets under a tree. We stared at each other for a beat – hard to say which of us was more taken aback. I thought I’d been rumbled, but in the scale of odd things that had already loomed in and out of Glynn’s blurred field of vision that evening, my lone presence did not strike him as especially perturbing. He may as well have dreamt me. I didn’t move a muscle, and, sure enough, Professor Glynn dismissed me and set off on his travels again. Where was he off to next? There was only one way to find out.

The other three slipped out from behind the tree when he had loped on a safe distance. We watched his departing figure. ‘Do you think he saw you?’ Aisling whispered. I shook my head, and they believed me. God knows what possessed them to invest faith in my opinion. The poor things, they were shivering, faces white as ghosts. Blue, in fact, in that light.

Glynn navigated his way back to Front Square, now plodding and sullen, having reached the conclusion he inevitably reached after a hard night on the batter: that there was nobody out there to help him. Instead of heading for the Arch, he veered off to House Eight and admitted himself in the door. After thirty seconds or so, a light on the first floor came on. We looked at each other in surprise. Not one of us had seen that room lit up before. It existed in our minds only as a locked door.

Glynn appeared in the window. He stretched his arms above his head and drew the edges of the curtains together, erasing his silhouette from view. It was the gesture of a god. We waited until the light was extinguished before relaxing our guard. Past midnight by then. Faye crept forward and posted his glasses through the letterbox, wrapped in a cocoon of tissues. Quiet in there, she reported. Not until we were certain he was safely delivered did we call off our vigil. And how was he when you found him? future biographers would ask us. Fragile, we would tell them, but we did everything in our power to protect him. The girls might catch their death, but no injury would come to Glynn on our watch, we would see to it. If they’d hit him, those gurriers outside the public toilets, if they had harmed so much as a hair on his head, we’d have come down on them, the four of us, like a ton of feathers.